Item Detail
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27713
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0
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2
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English
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Pedagogical Impulses and Incommensurables : Lived Mormonism in Hong Kong
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Mormon Studies Review
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3
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Provo, UT
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Brigham Young University
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2-10
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Writer Mohsin Hamid's take on globalization feels relevant to Mormonism in Hong Kong, where I live as a participant-observer in a cosmopolitan community of Latter-day Saints deftly (and often quite creatively) incorporating principles and practices into their lives. As a cultural historian who is interested in chronicling how individuals are changed by their cross-cultural encounters, I think, write, and teach about the intersection of gender, national identity, class, ethnicity, and historical time. I analyze stories of cross-cultural encounter through the lens of transnational feminism, narrative inquiry, and diaspora/Sinophone studies. Since 1993 I have observed, firsthand, the ways in which "rising China" (and much of Asia) engages or ignores "America" (read the United States) in its material and virtual forms.
Today, as a Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China, Hong Kong is also marked by its British colonial past and the ongoing presence of American neocolonialism. Dueling notions of national exceptionalism are evident in the public sphere. The question of what constitutes the "foreign" in the context of Mormonism in Asia often follows similar tributaries. The processes of globalization and self-invention that Hamid notes above are evident in LDS congregations in Asia.